The proprietor of Ealfrid’s Inn was actually named Gothreg, but he’d agreed to keep the inn’s original name when he took it over from his wife’s uncle, and it was easier to answer to “Ealfrid” than to explain that a dozen times a day.
Glancing out his front door and seeing Annwr and Caelym approaching, Gothreg did some quick mental calculations. News of the wealthy widow buying whatever struck her fancy for herself and her entourage had reached him early that afternoon, and he’d been wondering if they’d be turning up and where he’d put them if they did. The inn had more rooms empty than not during most of the year, but for the days of the fair in the spring and fall, every spare room, shed, and closet was filled.
A moderately devout Christian, Gothreg wasn’t about to evict Father Wulfric and the two traveling friars from the room he kept for itinerant clergy. Yes, he could squeeze the monk and his boy in there, but the wealthy widow was another matter. Seeing the bulging packs the widow and monk were carrying made up his mind for him—he and his wife would join the hired help on bed-rolls in the kitchen if the widow made it worth his while.
She did.
That business done, Gothreg cleared a table close to the hearth and laid out dinner for the widow and monk while his wife gathered up their things and moved them out of the two adjoining rooms they usually kept for themselves.
While his rooms were full, his dining room was empty, and likely to remain that way with both locals and visitors off to the food stands at the fair, so Gothreg, who was usually too busy to breathe at this time of day, made small talk about the weather as he unloaded his tray.
Before Annwr could say that he’d taken an oath of silence, Caelym spoke up, answering questions Gothreg hadn’t asked.
“I am, as you see, a monk, and am on a mission to the western coast. I have promised Mistress Columbina that I will take her and her orphaned grandsons with me to find the kin with whom they, the grandsons, will live forever after, while she will enter a Christian convent, and I will go on to fulfill my sacred oath to the Bishop, which can be delayed no longer than this.”
Pleased that he could now speak English in phrases as long and flowing as any he’d ever spoken in Celt, Caelym went on to cleverly lay out the specifications Annwr was demanding for the Aleswina’s new convent.
“Having done things in her younger days of which she now wishes to repent, Mistress Columbina seeks her final sanctuary among other nuns of her own race in a Christian convent that is sufficiently secluded to assure that she will not be disturbed by anyone out of her past.”
This was nowhere close to the most incriminating revelation Gothreg had received in his tenure as an innkeeper, and he answered without so much as raising his eyebrows, “Oh, you’d be looking for the Abbey of Saint Agnedd . . . Britons in it mostly . . . and if it’s withdrawing from the world she wants, then that’s the place for it.” (Here Gothreg paused to find the right phrase, since ‘to hell and gone again’ wasn’t something that he could say to a monk and an elderly widow on her way to entering a convent.) “It’s a fair bit off the main road on the far side of the fourth pass going west, but still this side of the big mountains, with nothing nearby besides a hamlet called Woghop, only—”
“Only?” Caelym leaned forward attentively.
“Only it’s still a grueling journey to the coast, with brigands and bandits to worry about, and not one for the mistress to take back without your protection.”
“That is no problem,” Caelym said quickly, before Annwr could put in her opinion about who was protecting who. “If you will kindly give us the direction to this Agnedd’s Abbey, I will see her safely settled there and take her grandsons on to the kin that wait for them afterward.”
“Well, there is another problem—”
“And that is?” Caelym was beginning to suspect the innkeeper was playing games with them.
But he wasn’t.
“The Sisters of the Abbey of Saint Agned are holier than most,” Gothreg explained, “and they recuse themselves completely for the forty days following the anniversary of the day their saint was martyred, opening their gates to no one—not for the pope himself, even if he were to kneel at their door wearing a woman’s wig—until the last of those forty days is up.”
“And when might that be?” Caelym’s fund of patience for things Christian, never great in the first place, was evaporating.
Surprised that he’d have to teach a monk about martyrs, especially one as well-known as Saint Agned, Gothreg counted a few rounds on his fingers and said, “Well, as she was done in on the first day of March, they’d be opening up again in another twelve days—that would be the fifth of May, if I’m counting it right.”
He wasn’t but was close enough as to make no practical difference.
“So then, what we will do is to travel to the village there, and Mistress Columbina will take a room and wait for them to open their door and welcome her in while the rest of us go on as I have promised”—Caelym allowed himself a distinct pause before finishing—“the Bishop.”
“I’m afraid you won’t be finding any inn in Woghop. It’s a smallish bit of a place, and those that live there don’t have the accommodations we do here.”
Here again Gothreg was choosing his words to fit the company, not saying bluntly that the best he’d ever hear of Woghop was that it was a filthy, stinking little pigsty where you couldn’t tell the men from the hogs. Sensing Caelym’s growing tension and sympathizing, since he wouldn’t have wanted to be caught between the widow and the Bishop either, he offered the best alternative he could think of on the spur of the moment.
“But what the Mistress could do would be to stay at the king’s lodge, which is just one valley over there.”
“And the king’s lodge is an inn with the excellent accommodations of your own?”
“No, the king’s lodge . . . well, it’s the king’s lodge.”
Seeing Caelym’s puzzled expression, Gothreg began to wonder if the monk was a bit dull-witted in spite of his high-toned manner of speaking. Making his own words as simple as possible and speaking slowly, he explained, “It’s called the king’s lodge because it’s the lodge that belongs to the king—or did, when he was still alive. It was his hunting lodge, though it’s not hunted from anymore now he’s dead.”
“Which king?”
The first words that Annwr spoke since she agreed to his price for the rooms startled Gothreg a bit, but guessing she was sharper than the monk, he answered at a normal rate of speed.
“The old king of Derthwald, Theobold—not the new one, Gilberth, who must own the place, as he inherited everything from his uncle, but has never been there, so far as I’ve ever heard. What I’m trying to say is that the old king’s lodge is still kept up by the old king’s servants, sent there to live out their days when the new king came to the throne and wanted new servants around him.”
Speaking in an oddly distant-sounding voice, Annwr murmured, “I knew one of those servants once. Her name was Millicent, and she was the nurse to the little princess. You wouldn’t have heard of her being there?”
“Why, yes she is—or was, the last I heard.”
While Gothreg’s inn was well inside the boundaries of Atheldom, his wife was from Derthwald, and would be there still if her father hadn’t been one of the royal guards who had been expelled from the palace when Gilberth took the throne. His in-laws remained intensely loyal to the old king’s memory, and they were bitter to this day that they had been sent off “before Theobold was cold in the ground!”
Nothing Gothreg could say about its making sense that the new king would want his own guards who were loyal to him made any difference to his wife. Instead, it just set her off on a bitter tirade in which he was compared unfavorably with the faithful servants of the old king who kept up his beloved hunting lodge “as if he were still alive and going to ride up to the front door with his banners flying and horns blowing like in the old days.”
Gothreg had never been to the old king’s lodge or met any of its inhabitants but had heard so much about them he could name them off and describe each one as if he’d known them in person. Almost without any effort, he repeated the poignant story his mother-in-law told whenever she came to visit of how Millicent, who had been both maid to the queen and nurse to the princess, still kept all the royal gowns washed and ready for the day the princess might want them, even knowing she’d been put in a convent. It was a story that sounded better the first time it was told, and Gothreg could see that Mistress Columbina, who he’d taken for a cold, hard-hearted crone, was touched to the core, even though she said nothing more, except to ask that he tell them how to find the way there.
While the innkeeper was drawing them a map on a sheet he tore from his accounting ledger, Annwr looked past him and out through the inn’s open door.
She hadn’t thought of Millicent in years and was surprised the name had jumped out of her lips so quickly. She was surprised, too, by how clearly she could picture the old woman she’d seen only once in her life—rushing around in the palace nursery, desperately trying to show her where Aleswina’s things were and, no doubt, heartbroken at being torn away from the little girl she dressed and cared for so lovingly. To think that for all these years, she’d held on to the hope of someday seeing the child that she, like Annwr, had come to love as her own!
“Mistress Columbina!” Caelym said softly. “It is time we take our bags to the rooms this kind innkeeper has given us for the night and go meet my helper and your grandsons at the fair, as we promised we would.” He put a gentle hand under her elbow, helped her to her feet, and handed her his satchel, before carrying the rest of their bags, with the innkeeper’s help, into their rooms.